Metro News & Reviews

Transportation headlines, Tuesday, June 1

Here’s a look at some of the transportation headlines gathered by the Metro Library. The full list of headlines is posted on the library’s blog. Don’t forget you can also follow the Metro Library on Facebook and Twitter.

If you think L.A.’s had to wait a long time for the fabled Subway to the Sea, you must check out this video from Rachel Maddow in which she looks at the history and current progress of New York City’s 2nd Avenue Subway. This subway would add a much needed transit option in the Eastside of Manhattan – a part of the city that is currently served by only one subway line that carries more passengers than the subways of Chicago, Boston and D.C. combined. The subway line has been proposed since the early 20th century and has had many false starts throughout the years. But now the New York City MTA is beginning the tunnel boring process and Maddow goes underground to see what’s involved in such a process. When talking about the importance of the 2nd Avenue Line, the MTA’s president in charge of the construction, Michael Horodniceanu, says, “New York could not exist without its subways. In fact, no metropolis can exist without subways.”

How do you sell alternative transportation? Copenhagenize thinks looking to the worldwide growth in popularity of sushi can be a good place to start. After all, if such a strange dish to western tastes – raw fish on sticky rice couldn’t be more different than a McD’s burger and fries – could find mass appeal, then why not cycling? And for that matter, why not mass transit? Alternative transportation marketers take heed.

When it comes to hundreds of billions of dollars, I only know one thing – it’s a lot of money. So here’s Grist’s breakdown of some of the health costs involved with our auto-centric culture:

$142 billion in obesity-related health care costs and lost wages due to illness. As much as $80 billion in health care costs and premature death caused by air pollution from traffic. A whopping $180 billion from traffic crashes – lost wages, health care costs, property damage, travel delay, legal costs, pain and suffering … do we need to go on?

In a nutshell: a tourist in Utah consults Google Maps for walking directions, the all-knowing algorithm led her astray onto a rural highway “that is not reasonably safe for pedestrians,” and boom, woman is hit by car. And boom, woman is suing Google. Could this story also represent America in a nutshell?